Friday, 22 August 2014

Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders reviewed by Julia Jones

“ 'We wish we could go to the
future,' Cyril said, 'But somewhere quite near, please.' ” At the beginning
of Kate Saunders's heart-wrenching final adventure of Edith
Nesbit's Psammead, the four older children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert
and Jane – are still living innocently in 1905. The Psammead is the
ancient sand-fairy who has been granting them wishes, with varying
degrees of success, since they first dug him up in the classic story
Five Children and It (1902). Nesbit's children encountered him
again in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and once more in
The Story of the Amulet (1906). The
Amulet is a time travel story and includes scenes set in a benign
Utopian future which reflects the author's own Fabian aspirations. The real future for those young
Edwardians would be cruelly different. In the prologue to Saunders's Five Children on the
Western Front the Psammead sends the children forward from 1905
to 1930 to visit their friend, the professor. While they are there Anthea looks at
some photographs – but what they show is not the same as the
photographs they glimpsed during The Story of the Amulet. “ 'I saw a
couple of pictures of ladies who looked a bit like Mother and might
have been me or Jane but I didn't see any grown up men who looked a
bit like you boys. I wonder why not.'

Far away in
1930 in his empty room, the old professor was crying."

And so was I! The
current spate of World War 1 remembrances is hard on the emotions and one or
twice I've been ashamed to find myself suffering something close to compassion fatigue. I approached
Five Children on the Western Front with slight
trepidation – was it just going to be a clever idea brought out at
an opportune moment? I read it in the happiest of circumstances (lazing in
the sunshine down a river on a boat) and was completely unprepared to
find myself sobbing helplessly over the final pages. With my head I had guessed
what would happen; in my heart I was overwhelmed.
I opened that last chapter again just now to check the sequence of
events and,
dammit, I'm needing to wipe my eyes and blow my nose before I can
carry on writing.

How
has Kate Saunders managed this? Her novel is far richer and deeper
than Nesbit's and, for my taste, funnier as well. This isn't intended
to be dismissive of the Founding Mother – Edith Nesbit has a
stature and originality that the rest of us will only ever dream of – but
rereading her Five Children and It did make me aware of the
limitations of the string-of-adventures format. Five Children on
the Western Front has several story-lines, a plot, a wider
range of tones and characters and the scope to be part of something
that is bigger than itself. It's certainly a book which hits that magic, inter-generational space where both adults and children can
read with full engagement.

Five Children on the Western Front belongs less to the children than to the Psammead. The sand-fairy is in trouble,
deservedly so. “By the sound of it you behaved like an absolute cad,”
says the Lamb. “My dear Lamb everyone kills a few slaves.” He is comic, he is nasty and can be seen as the prototype of all fallen
emperors. There's a brief chapter where the action fast-forwards to
1938 and he's discovered chatting amiably with Kaiser Bill, with whom
he feels much in common.

When
the Psammead arrives back in Nesbit's Kentish gravel pit in October
1914, just as Cyril, the oldest boy, is leaving for the war, he's
been stripped of his powers. He's confused, vulnerable and furious “A
stiff little boulder of crossness” as Saunders memorably describes
him. He has been sent down to repent and it's lucky for him that
Saunders has added a sixth child, nine-year-old Edie, to the original
five. She's the only one who has time to stroke and care for him as
her older brothers and sisters cope with the army, university, school
and (for the older girls) their first attempts to challenge their parents'
pre-war expectations. They are busy and are occasionally exasperated
with Sammy's obdurate selfishness and his refusal to acknowledge his past
crimes. Edie, however, sees “bewilderment in his eyes and lurking
terror”. Her love is constant and undemanding and gives him his
best chance to learn the lessons of the universe.

The Psammead does
learn and tears are the true response. I've relished all Kate
Saunders's books since the day she bought her Belfry Witches series
to our children's village primary school but this is The One. Five
Children on the Western Front will be published by Faber in
October and I want to press it on every reading household. There is
an Author's Afterword which reminds us, poignantly, that constant
love and premature loss are not confined to 1914-1918. Some of us will still suffer “the worst
sorrow there is.”

I couldn't agree more with this excellent review which persuaded me to buy the book. Five Children and It was one of my favourite reads as a child and I worried that it wouldn't stand a sequel. I needn't have done. Kate Saunders' book is an intelligent, moving, multi-layered work which is better in many ways than the original: an idea brilliantly executed and for me, already a classic. And I'm a 54 year old man still in bits having just reached the final pages.

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